Once You Break a Knuckle (18 page)

—Matt, Twigg says up at me. —Matt, come on.

Then I hear my pal Duncan laugh from the roof of his house, a dumpy panelboard bungalow that used to be a laundromat. He's got a view of us from up there. Twiggy yells for help and Duncan says, —Yeah, I'll help you, but he doesn't move. I level the cannon where I suspect Twigg's ass is, though I can't be sure because I'm shitfaced and because Twigg has come into possession of a campaign sign for the local election – there's a pile of them ditched into the marsh, another story – and spread it over his crotch for defence. I pinch one eye shut and sight down the barrel at the salesman grin of Don Chabót, Conservative Party.

Me and Ash dated for a couple weeks before Twigg ruined it. I'd ferreted her from this goody-goody named Will who thought himself tough because his old man was a cop. I pegged him as a pushover. Ash had freckles and a small upturned nose and muscled arms, the kind
of grey, appropriately spaced eyes that always seemed a tad disappointed in everything I had to say. Progress with her was slow but gradual, the occasional palm on her flat stomach but no further, maybe a glance down her shirt while we made out. Most evenings we'd do things like skirt the lake and examine odd-looking driftwood or loiter at the gelati café to sip coffees with long-winded names.

That particular and devastating day she'd come to hang out with me and Twigg and Duncan to drink beers and shoot shit. Now I've known Twiggy for the better part of a long time and his luck with girls is ill-fated at best. You might say there's a disconnect between him and the knowledge of what girls like. We're up on the roof with a flat of Kokanee and the potato cannon. Duncan blares one at the vast nothingness of the marsh and it shrinks to a dot against the Rocky Mountains. We pass the cannon around. Even Ash takes a go. On my turn I crack the chamber and tear a hunk of pool noodle and cram it in behind the potato. I lift the beast beside my ear. Across the street there's a gas station and the dumbasses who work the till have misspelled “3 cents of at pump.” I take aim at the missing
f
and smell the tarry ABS and feel the horizon on my cheek and it is then that Twigg drops my pants. I don't mean only my pants – the whole mechanism. Jeans, belt, boxers. I'm awhirl in the breeze and Twigg's got this shit-eating grin and Ash makes a noise like a cat about to hawk.

I chased her down the street like a married man. When she stopped we were on a bridge over a railroad
and beneath us a train trundled along the track. I think: alright, damage control, like my dad used to preach. But Ash won't hear it. —Sorry Matt, she says, this look like she's about to turn down a loan. —You're just too much of a
boy
.

So Ash is ten-thirty-five and I've got Twigg on the ground and the cannon on my shoulder. Don Chabót's double chin fills my crosshairs and I wonder how Twigg figured the campaign sign would help his cause. The potato blows that dopey smile to hell and Twigg shrieks, and he shrieks again, this savage, desperate sound I've only heard mimicked one time since: a woman who screamed
He's choking!
to a full restaurant in Miami. Duncan scrambled down from the roof. Twigg had gone fetal on us.

Testicular torsion
is not a pretty thing to even say. It is a twisting of the spermatic cord identified by moderate to high discomfort and the restriction of blood flow to the nut-sac, a medical emergency. Neither Duncan nor I were in any shape to drive. We made a few phone calls. Twigg got to the hospital in time. The doctors opened him up and did what they had to do and later he'd tell us he felt the knife go in.

Not much remains of those summers. Duncan's gone, dumb bastard, and our old binge grounds have been wrecking-balled. That limitless marsh has parched up and nowadays the hardware stores won't sell boys a length of ABS pipe. Maybe the town has moved on. I only see Twigg every couple years, and last I heard he'd set up shop on the East Coast where he explosion-proofs submarines. I guess
that's the way things go. Though we'll talk about her over beers, neither of us are really sure what happened to Ash Cooper. Maybe she ended up with her cop-son husband, still in old Invermere, twisted into the nostalgia of it all.

—Small-town girls, Twigg might mumble into his pint. —They come into your life and then they're gone and you've forgotten them just as quick. You know how it is, Matt. You know how it is.

THE DEAD ROADS

One time we roadtripped across the country with Animal Brooks, and he almost got run over by a pickup truck partway through Alberta. It was me and my twenty-year-old girlfriend Vic and him, him in his cadpat jumpsuit, Vic in her flannel logger coat and her neon hair that glowed like a bush-lamp. We'd known Animal since grade school: the north-born shitkicker, like Mick Dundee. A lone ranger, or something. Then in 2002 the three of us crammed into his '67 Camaro to tear-ass down the Trans-Canada at eighty miles an hour. Vic and me had a couple hundred bucks and time to kill before she went back to university. That'd make it August, or just so. Animal had a way of not caring too much and a way of hitting on Vic. He was twenty-six and hunted looking, with engine-grease stubble and red eyes sunk past his cheekbones. In his commie hat and Converses he had that hurting lurch, like a scrapper's swag, dragging foot after foot with his knees loose and his shoulders slumped. He'd drink a garden hose under the table if it looked at him wrong. He
once boned a girl in some poison ivy bushes, but was a gentleman about it. An ugly dent caved his forehead and rumours around Invermere said he'd been booted by a cow and then survived.

Vic stole shotgun right from the get-go and Animal preferred a girl beside him anyway, so I'd squished in the back among our gear. We had a ton of liquor but only a two-man tent because Animal didn't care one way. He'd packed nothing but his wallet and a bottle-rimmed copy of
The Once and Future King
, and he threatened to beat me to death with the Camaro's dipstick if he caught me touching his book. His brother used to read it to him before bed, and that made it an item of certain value, a real point of civic pride.

The Camaro's vinyl seats smelled like citrus cleaner. First time I ever got a girl pregnant was in Animal's backseat, but I didn't want to mention it since Vic would've ditched out then and there. Vic'll crack you with a highball glass if you say the wrong thing, she can do that. We weren't really dating, either. She just came home in the summers to visit her old man and score a few bucks slopping mortar, and we'd hook up. I don't know anyone prettier than Vic. She's got a heart-shaped face and sun freckles on her chin and a lazy eye when she drinks and these wineglass-sized breasts I get to look at sometimes. On the West Coast she bops around with a university kid who wears a sweater and carries a man purse. Her dad showed me a picture of the guy, all milk-jug ears and a pinched nose that'd bust easy in a fight. Upper-middle-class, horizon-in-his-irons,
that type. Not that I can really complain, I guess. Vic never mentioned him and I never mentioned him and we went about our business like we used to, like when we were sixteen and bent together in the old fur-trading fort up the beach on Caribou Road.

Vic planned our journey with a 1980s road atlas she snagged from her dad's material shed. Animal kept his hand on the stick shift so he could zag around semis hauling B.C. timber to the tar sands. Whenever he geared to fifth his palm plopped onto Vic's thigh. Each time, she'd swat him and give him the eyebrow and he'd wink at me in the rearview. —Dun worry, Duncan, I wouldn't do that to ya, he'd say, but I know Animal.

For the first day we plowed east through the national park. Cops don't patrol there so Animal went batshit. His Camaro handled like a motorbike and it packed enough horse to climb a hill in fifth, and I don't know if he let off the gun the whole way. He held a Kokanee between his legs and gulped it whenever the road straightened. Animal was a top-notch driver. As a job, he manned a cargo truck for this organic potato delivery service. One time he spun an e-brake slide at forty miles per hour, so me and him could chase down these highschoolers who'd hucked a butternut squash through his windshield.

To kill time, Animal bought a
Playboy
and handed it to Vic. He suggested she do a dramatic read if possible. At first she gave him the eye, but he threatened to have me do it if not her. He also handed her all the receipts for gas and food and booze to keep track of, on account of
her higher education, but I'm not even sure Vic did much math. At university she studied biology and swamplands, and I like to think I got her into it, since there's a great wide marsh behind this place we used to get shitfaced at. It's a panelboard bungalow on the outskirts of town, built, Vic figures, on floodland from the Sevenhead River. Vic and me used to stash our weed in the water, pinned under the vegetation band. One time we stole election signs and ditched them in the marsh, and the
Valley Echo
printed a headline that said the cops didn't know to call it vandalism or a political statement. Neither did I really, since Vic planned the whole thing. Then last summer I asked her to muck around the marsh with me but she said we really shouldn't, because it's drying up. She had a bunch of science to prove it. —Something has to change, Dunc, she said, pawing at me. —Or there'll be nothing left.

Eventually Animal bored of the Trans-Canada, so he veered onto some single-lane switchback that traced the Rocky Mountains north. I thought Vic'd be distressed but turned out she expected it. She shoved the road atlas under the seat and dug a baggie of weed from her pack. Later, we played punch buggy, but I couldn't see much from the back and Vic walloped me on the charley horse so goddamn hard I got gooseskins straight down to my toes.

THE SIGN SAID
,
Tent Camping – $15
, and Animal said, —Fuck that shit, and then he booted the sign pole, for good measure. He plunked himself on the Camaro's cobalt hood and rubbed his eyes. We'd been on the road
for a while, and I don't remember if he ever slept much. The air smelled like forest fire and it also reeked of cow shit, but Alberta usually reeks of cow shit. Vic leaned into the door frame, hip cocked to one side like a teenager. Her flannel sleeves hung too low and she bunched the extra fabric in each fist. She chewed a piece of her hair. When we used to date I would tug those strands out of her mouth and she'd ruck her eyebrows to a scowl and I'd scramble away before she belted me one. It was starting to turn to evening. In the low Albertan dusk her bright hair shone the colour of whiskey. She caught me staring, winked.

Vic slid her hands in her jean pockets. —I got fifteen bucks.

—Yeah I bet ya do, Animal said.

—What the hell does that mean?

—Et's Duncan's cash, enn'it?

—Just some, Vic said.

—I got more money 'en Duncan, ya know.

—Shut your mouth, Animal, I told him.

—Jus sayin, he said, and ducked into the driver seat.

We reached someplace called Shellyoak and Animal called all eyes on the lookout for a campsite. He drove through the town's main haul, where the Camaro's wide nose spanned the lane past centre. A ways out, the Rockies marked the border home. This far north their surfaces were dotted with pine husks – grey, chewed-out shells left over from the pine beetle plague. Not a living tree in sight. Shellyoak's buildings were slate brick with round chimneys and tiny windows high as a man's chin. A group
of kids smoked dope on a street bench and Vic hollered for directions and one waved up the lane with an arm so skinny it flailed like an elastic. —Near the amusement park, he called.

Big rocks broke the landscape on Shellyoak's outskirts, and Vic figured it used to be under a glacier. Animal was dead silent the whole way. I guess the bony trees irked him, that carcass forest. The stink of woodsmoke blasted from the fan and it reminded me of the chimneys that burned when I used to scrape frost off Vic's windshield, all those mornings after I stayed the night at her place. One time her dad was in the kitchen as I tried to sneak out, and he handed me a coffee and some ice shears and told me to keep in his good books. Then he said Vic and me made a good pair, us two, but if I got her pregnant he'd probably beat me to death with an extension cord. He grinned like a boy, I remember. Then he said, —Seriously though, ya make a good pair. A few minutes later Vic tiptoed downstairs and her old man clapped me on the shoulder like a son, and Vic smiled as if she could be happier than ever.

Animal yawed us around a bend and all at once the horizon lit up with a neon clown head big as an RV. From our angle, it looked as if the clown also had rabbit ears, flopped down like two bendy fluorescent scoops. The highway'd gone gravel and the Camaro's tires pinged pebbles on the undercarriage. In the distance I saw a Ferris wheel rocking like a treetop, but not much else in the park to speak of. Animal geared down and this time when he laid his palm on Vic's knee he didn't take it off, and she
didn't smack him. He still winked at me in the rearview, though. A second later Vic shook his hand away.

—Christ, it's a gas station too, Vic said, pointing at the pumps hidden in the clown's shadow. Animal steered toward them, tapped the fuel gauge with its needle at quarter-tank.

—You've got enough, I said, but he didn't so much as grunt.

He parked at the first pump and unfolded from the vehicle. Vic popped her seat forward so I could climb out. Figures milled inside the gas station and their outlines peered through the glass. A painted sign that said
Tickets, 5 bucks
hung above the door. On it, somebody'd drawn a moose. Animal started pumping gas. He tweaked his eyebrows at me. —Well?

—The hell do you want now, I said.

—Go enside and ask where we ken camp, he said. He winked over my shoulder, at Vic. —Giddyup now.

—They'll tell us to go to the pay grounds.

—Kid said we ken camp near the amusement park.